Andrii-zvorygin Peak-oil Meeting Transcript — July 9, 2026

00:00:00 speaker_unknown: On the full screen, it is greetings in the love and light of the infinite crater.

00:00:19 speaker_unknown: I'm Andres Morgan, joined here today with John Day and Simon Michaud, Steve, John Peach, and many others.

00:00:41 speaker_unknown: And Jean Lejare was having some technical difficulties with his microphone, so we're going to start with a presentation by John Day on the lifecycle of oil and gas fields in the Louisiana coastal zone.

00:00:57 speaker_unknown: So first, one of Want to let John introduce himself.

00:01:04 speaker_unknown: Go ahead, John.

00:01:18 speaker_unknown: I don't know how many you know this, but Charlie Hall and I were fellow students in Chapel Hill in the late '60s, early '70s, and we both got a PhD with Howard Odom.

00:01:41 speaker_unknown: And as you probably know, he's a he's a guy that changed people's lives.

00:01:53 speaker_unknown: And so Charlie and I have been have gone back and forth on energy issues and other issues.

00:02:06 SPEAKER_001: and ecology over the last half century,

00:02:12 SPEAKER_001: and I have worked extensively in the Mississippi Delta and deltas worldwide.

00:02:37 SPEAKER_001: And what I'm going to do today is I'm not going to do any EROI analysis, but I'm going to talk about how deltas function and how how oil and gas activity impacted the Mississippi Delta.

00:03:01 SPEAKER_001: And if we want to get an accurate energy balance, we have to consider what it would take to to restore the delta, the the damages the oil industry caused.

00:03:15 SPEAKER_001: So, can we have the slides up?

00:03:21 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:03:22 SPEAKER_001: All right.

00:03:25 SPEAKER_001: Next slide, if you please.

00:03:27 SPEAKER_001: All right.

00:03:30 SPEAKER_001: I'm going to talk about.

00:03:47 SPEAKER_001: I don't know how much people know about delta, so I'm going to talk just briefly about the Mississippi Delta, and look at four ways that oil and gas activity affects the delta.

00:04:07 SPEAKER_001: There's pervasive alteration of surface hydrology and ecology.

00:04:14 SPEAKER_001: There's induced subsidence and wetland loss as pervasive contamination.

00:04:19 SPEAKER_001: The infrastructure left in place.

00:04:28 SPEAKER_001: And I'll say a few words about governmental and societal impacts.

00:04:46 SPEAKER_001: When you have a huge industry like that in a small, weak state like Louisiana, their impact on all aspects of our government and our Government in our life are really significant.

00:05:10 SPEAKER_001: Well, deltas formed the the current current world deltas that exist today didn't exist fifteen thousand years ago because sea level was about one hundred and thirty meters below today.

00:05:31 SPEAKER_001: And when it came back up and stabilized, sea level stabilized about five thousand years ago.

00:05:48 SPEAKER_001: Deltas around the world started building the delta by shifting their the There the channels that the river took, and these are major channel shifts.

00:06:10 SPEAKER_001: And you can see here there are about six or seven major deltas, and you can see the ages on them from 7,500 to 5,000 years ago,

00:06:31 SPEAKER_001: right up until the last 400 years that that's been building the present mouth of the Mississippi River.

00:06:55 SPEAKER_001: And so the the river flowed preferentially into the Peripherentially into these different lobes when they were active, but during big floods, a lot of water flowed into these existing channels,

00:07:19 SPEAKER_001: and so that built a wetland Mississippi Delta of about oh 15,000 square kilometers, about half water, half wetlands, back in the 19th century.

00:07:40 SPEAKER_001: And as the as the delta lobes shifted around, if you look at the the other one, they formed a series of interdis terry base Distributary basins,

00:08:06 SPEAKER_001: because the river channels built these distributary channels that were a few meters up to maybe ten meters maximum above the level of the wetlands, and so that prevented east-west movement of water.

00:08:27 SPEAKER_001: And that also there's also a these wetlands range from forested wetlands inland to salt marshes near the coast,

00:08:48 SPEAKER_001: and you can see the different wetland zones there.

00:08:53 SPEAKER_001: and then the other thing is that between 1932 and 2016, you see there was this dramatic loss of wetlands, all the blue areas,

00:09:07 SPEAKER_001: and I'm gonna talk about why that happened, and and the oil and gas industry played an enormous difference there.

00:09:18 SPEAKER_001: And the latest delta forming is the Chapala Delta.

00:09:27 SPEAKER_001: You can see in the upper left that that's been the last 50 years, and you see.

00:09:38 SPEAKER_001: the only place we're getting significant wetland gain is there on the middle coast,

00:09:47 SPEAKER_001: and that's the newly forming a chafalai delta.

00:09:54 SPEAKER_001: But over the next thousand years, it will form a huge delta.

00:10:09 SPEAKER_001: Okay, so let's get to the point of why these wetland loss occurred, and just to give you an idea of the extensive impact,

00:10:30 SPEAKER_001: the upper map shows the pipeline network in the coastal zone in Louisiana.

00:10:37 SPEAKER_001: and you can you can see there that where New Orleans is, there's that Lake Pontchartrain, but there's an extensive inshore pipeline,

00:10:50 SPEAKER_001: thousands of kilometers of pipelines, and then offshore, thousands more of pipelines going off to the offshore deposits.

00:11:07 SPEAKER_001: And the bottom is the bottom map shows basically oil and gas well permits, and these are for wells that have been And these are for wells that have now basically dead,

00:11:21 SPEAKER_001: and they have been plugged and are abandoned as of 2017.

00:11:37 SPEAKER_001: And part of when the oil industry finishes a well, they're supposed to abandon it, plug it securely, and remove all infrastructure around.

00:11:50 SPEAKER_001: And they have done hardly any of that.

00:12:04 SPEAKER_001: But this gives you an idea of how extensive the impact of oil and gas activities that just covers the whole coastal zone, and they're.

00:12:22 SPEAKER_001: Coastal zone, and there are about seven hundred inshore oil and gas fields, represented by where all those dots are.

00:12:44 SPEAKER_001: Okay, the next, and so here's here's a production history and wetland loss in the in the, and an individual field, the Madison Bay field, and the fields take their names from local identifying locations,

00:13:08 SPEAKER_001: and you can see there that the peak wetland loss rates were highest there around 1970, and you can see the gas peaked around 1970.

00:13:22 SPEAKER_001: The oil had two peaks from 1970, and then there was renewed production in the 80s and 90s.

00:13:44 SPEAKER_001: And and then note that water is coming out of there, and that's what's called brine, produced water or brine that comes out of essentially all oil. wells, when they're drilled, most of the, overwhelmingly,

00:14:03 SPEAKER_001: the majority of fluid is is brine, and it's and it's high salinity.

00:14:17 SPEAKER_001: Some of it's just saturated, and it's also full of an enormous variety of toxins.

00:14:36 SPEAKER_001: And then, if you look on the bottom, you see that wetland loss sort of followed the the trajectory of oil and gas and and water production in the Mississippi Delta.

00:14:58 SPEAKER_001: So. there was a co, co. It's a co-occurrence thing, but it's also an an indication of, of just how, closely tied together these things are.

00:15:09 SPEAKER_001: All right, next.

00:15:15 SPEAKER_001: If there are any questions along the way, just stop me.

00:15:21 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:15:21 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:15:26 SPEAKER_001: So here's a couple.

00:15:34 SPEAKER_001: I'm going to show you a couple of examples of the development of individual oil and gas fields.

00:15:53 SPEAKER_001: This is the Venice field.

00:15:56 SPEAKER_001: down near the mouth of the current Mississippi River, and you can see in the 1940s it was characterized by extensive wetlands and these low distributory ridges.

00:16:14 SPEAKER_001: And the the the yellowish green color means they had an elevation associated with them because as water flows in them and sediment flows out,

00:16:24 SPEAKER_001: it builds these natural levees that are higher than the surrounding wetlands.

00:16:41 SPEAKER_001: But that's a completely natural situation. and when you look at maps like this, look at these natural channels that are there, and so over time, 1957.

00:16:57 SPEAKER_001: Now this is around an oil and sub subsurface oil dome.

00:17:12 SPEAKER_001: I don't know if people are familiar with that, but you have these huge pillars of salt that have flowed up over millions of years, and they can be 10 kilometers high,

00:17:40 SPEAKER_001: and five to 10 kilometers wide, and in in a case of many oil. fields, they're found around the flanks of these oil domes, and this is this is probably down several thousand meters.

00:17:54 SPEAKER_001: And so, 56, you see a mature oil and gas field.

00:18:04 SPEAKER_001: There's a circular canal, and each one of those short canals is going to a rig access location.

00:18:17 SPEAKER_001: And then also, there's some canals that go into the center of that.

00:18:31 SPEAKER_001: By 1982, you can see the canals have widened significantly, and and and wetland have disappeared in the center of this because the the land is subsiding naturally,

00:18:45 SPEAKER_001: and there's induced subsidence due to the the human activities.

00:18:57 SPEAKER_001: And by 1998, most of the wetlands are gone, and you can see most of the canals are gone.

00:19:21 SPEAKER_001: You don't even see the spoil banks anymore, and the areas that are still above land. there are areas that are impounded for, you know, there are stations there, pumping stations, etc., like that.

00:19:38 SPEAKER_001: That's that's a classic case of something that happens over like over a half century or more.

00:19:47 SPEAKER_001: Okay, let's look at one more.

00:19:52 SPEAKER_001: Has a question?

00:19:53 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:19:55 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, yeah, John.

00:20:08 SPEAKER_001: So you're saying that they basically drilled these well wells around the around the edge of that salt, though, and that's why it's that thick, sir?

00:20:32 SPEAKER_001: Okay, yeah, just. and and and the oil collects because they're also the domes as they as they migrated up them slowly, they went through shales because they were there were areas of shales.

00:20:45 SPEAKER_001: It's like a giant mushroom underground.

00:20:48 SPEAKER_001: The oil collects under the edges of the mushroom.

00:20:52 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:21:03 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, and and then the shales were formed from mud deposits of the Mississippi River over millions of years, and so those shales are stuck up against. the oil dome,

00:21:17 SPEAKER_001: and that constraint—that's where the oil and gas rock dome.

00:21:28 SPEAKER_001: It's trout, and it's you know, and it's it's not an open space.

00:21:37 SPEAKER_001: You find oil and sand and gravel things that have space in the in the pores in the rock.

00:21:46 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, yeah.

00:21:53 SPEAKER_001: So that that's the Venice oil field close to the Mississippi River.

00:22:08 SPEAKER_001: The next one is another oil field called Bully Camp, and these, as I say, this this these are named after the local areas.

00:22:25 SPEAKER_001: And there's a And there's the field in 1935.

00:22:37 SPEAKER_001: You see, there's a bayou along the bottom there.

00:22:47 SPEAKER_001: I can't really read it, but so the the areas natural there.

00:23:09 SPEAKER_001: You can see these old small tributaries there flowing through the area, and this is an area that where there's sulfur deposited on top of the dome, and oil around the flanks of the dome.

00:23:28 SPEAKER_001: And so, by 1956, they were drilling for both oil. oil, and sulfur.

00:23:45 SPEAKER_001: They would pump, you know, highly heated water down, melt the sulfur, pump it back up, and you get very high subsidence rates there.

00:24:04 SPEAKER_001: And so the the pond that opens up over the years in this field is for sulfur production, and and on the lower left,

00:24:29 SPEAKER_001: basically the the the the size of that circle that pond is about the size of the sulfur deposits on.

00:24:43 SPEAKER_001: top of the dome, and that's where sulfur collected.

00:24:49 SPEAKER_001: And all around it, you see oil and gas canals.

00:24:58 SPEAKER_001: There, the canals themselves, and then the spoil banks with elevated ridges.

00:25:06 SPEAKER_001: Stuff dredged from the canals was just placed alongside, but they form dams in the marsh.

00:25:22 SPEAKER_001: And then, because the all deltas sink, the Mississippi River delta has about ten thousand meters of sediments under that have formed over the last several.

00:25:49 SPEAKER_001: hundred million years,

00:25:53 SPEAKER_001: and so the you know all of this organic production, which which at the surface, both wetlands and phytoplankton, gave rise to the the organic matter that's been buried, cooked,

00:26:09 SPEAKER_001: and under high pressure and produced the oil and gas.

00:26:22 SPEAKER_001: But as you see, you know the the you can see the pond for the sulfur is sort of it stays the same size, but then over time,

00:26:37 SPEAKER_001: if you look in 1998 and out to 20.

00:26:49 SPEAKER_001: Ninety-eight and out to twenty ten, the the wetlands in the middle of all this network of oil and gases have pretty much disappeared.

00:27:07 SPEAKER_001: And natural wetlands, coastal wetlands, are fed by tides that bring in sediments.

00:27:18 SPEAKER_001: They drain them so they're healthy.

00:27:38 SPEAKER_001: And and and in a subsiding environment like this, wetlands to survive have to build vertically at a rate equal to local relative water level rise, relative sea level rise,

00:27:53 SPEAKER_001: which is due to subsidence and eustatic sea level rise.

00:28:15 SPEAKER_001: For most of the time, it's all—it's mostly been due to subsidence, but we're moving into a period where eustatic sea level rise is going to become the main one.

00:28:30 SPEAKER_001: So, so John is John is the subsidence proportional to the amount?

00:28:51 SPEAKER_001: I mean, approximately the same in volume as the amount of stuff that's been taken out.

00:29:05 SPEAKER_001: No, no, the oil and sulfur and in brine that's been pumped out is the subsidence equivalent to that or more?

00:29:15 SPEAKER_001: No, no, it's it's less.

00:29:16 SPEAKER_001: Less.

00:29:27 SPEAKER_001: Well, I mean, the thing is that the reservoir doesn't completely collapse because you're leaving behind the matrix of gravel or sand or whatever,

00:29:42 SPEAKER_001: or calcium carbonate that that the oil is in when it's pumped out.

00:30:07 SPEAKER_001: So there's a lot of stuff down there.

00:30:11 SPEAKER_001: and if you drop the elevation of a coastal marsh in Louisiana because it's a microtidal environment by 20 centimeters, all the wetlands, the salt marshes, will die.

00:30:27 SPEAKER_001: They just they they live within an area of of in the tidal frame, which is only about 20 centimeters.

00:30:44 SPEAKER_001: And if they get out of that range, they either turn to dry land or they they go away.

00:30:57 SPEAKER_001: So the marsh has to keep being productive, building. below ground biomass, organic soil formation, to survive.

00:31:13 SPEAKER_001: But in natural conditions, it did that.

00:31:18 SPEAKER_001: Can we get back to the slides?

00:31:21 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:31:26 SPEAKER_001: So these are just two examples, and I'm going to talk about some of these.

00:31:34 SPEAKER_001: So here's alterations to surface hydrology.

00:31:40 SPEAKER_001: Let's just look at some of the examples.

00:31:50 SPEAKER_001: And I've been studying this now for 50 years, and you know I've talked to Charlie a lot about it.

00:32:04 SPEAKER_001: There's a fundamental difference between a natural channel and a natural marsh and a and a marsh with a canal.

00:32:23 SPEAKER_001: You see that in a natural marsh, you have a shallow tidal channel, a streamside levee that's formed as sediments are deposited on the edge when the tide floods over it,

00:32:44 SPEAKER_001: and then it flows back in, and there's higher production on that edge.

00:33:02 SPEAKER_001: But normal tides top over top that streamside levee, and when you dig a canal, the water is much deeper. and those natural bayous.

00:33:13 SPEAKER_001: There, I don't know.

00:33:17 SPEAKER_001: Most of them are less than two meters deep, a meter deep.

00:33:33 SPEAKER_001: But you dig a canal that's about three meters deep or more, and then the spoil is piled up on the edge of it.

00:33:52 SPEAKER_001: And the only thing that top overtops that spoil bank is during hurricanes.

00:34:16 SPEAKER_001: Otherwise, it blocks all the flow, and the marshes behind there are much less productive, and are producing much less organic matter in the. in the below ground biomass,

00:34:33 SPEAKER_001: and so they fall behind and turn into all those ponds that I was talking about.

00:34:46 SPEAKER_001: So this is one of the major things that the oil and gas canals do.

00:34:54 SPEAKER_001: And experiments where keep going.

00:35:10 SPEAKER_001: Experiments where sediment was added to the surface of the marsh will generally result in a significant increase in above ground production and below ground production. and you know you can see it's a big jump

00:35:25 SPEAKER_001: in below ground production between ten zero and ten centimeters,

00:35:31 SPEAKER_001: but pretty much levels off after that, and that's what the natural tide does.

00:35:37 SPEAKER_001: It brings sediments in, it drains well.

00:35:50 SPEAKER_001: The marshes are healthy, and you've got the sediments help build up the inorganic sediments, and the organic substrate that's formed by the growing plants.

00:36:02 SPEAKER_001: Okay, next.

00:36:06 SPEAKER_001: All right, here's an example.

00:36:15 SPEAKER_001: This. is down along the channel in this picture in the upper left.

00:36:29 SPEAKER_001: In each of these three images is Bayou Lafourche, which was the Mississippi River about a thousand years ago.

00:36:42 SPEAKER_001: I mean, it looked like the Mississippi River does today, if you go down to New Orleans.

00:36:55 SPEAKER_001: Now it's about a hundred meters wide and two or three meters deep, but it has a wide natural levee.

00:37:08 SPEAKER_001: And and this is the there are two things here.

00:37:27 SPEAKER_001: There's the Southwest Louisiana Canal. was a canal dug early in the 20th century that went from Bayou Lafourche over to Caminada Bay, the nearest large bay.

00:37:38 SPEAKER_001: And this is the Leveil Oil Field.

00:37:46 SPEAKER_001: And by 1998, it had been in production since the 40s.

00:38:03 SPEAKER_001: You see most of the marsh is gone already, and what you have is this network of canals and spoil banks, and some marsh in the interstices areas of this.

00:38:24 SPEAKER_001: And then by 2017, essentially all the marsh is gone, and many of the spoil banks, and so the red is what disappeared between 98 and 2017,

00:38:46 SPEAKER_001: and and you can see a lot of now the spoil banks are eroding away because they're sinking, and this exposes the existing marshes to higher wave energy, so which erodes them.

00:39:06 SPEAKER_001: So this is a this is a characteristic pattern of wetland loss that you that you saw in those other examples.

00:39:17 SPEAKER_003: Next. there have been a number of studies estimating the direct and indirect impacts of wetland loss,

00:39:28 SPEAKER_003: and their estimates that oil and gas activities have led to oh something like twenty to almost a hundred percent.

00:39:42 SPEAKER_003: And if I would, the general rule of thumb people talk about in Louisiana that fifty percent of this is due to oil and gas, you know, on average,

00:40:02 SPEAKER_001: and it's a lot of variability in there. but I've published I've published a lot on all of this, so it's a major impact.

00:40:18 SPEAKER_003: The other major impact is they levee a lot of the Mississippi River, so the river water doesn't get out into the Deltaic Plain anymore.

00:40:26 SPEAKER_003: So it's these two major factors.

00:40:29 SPEAKER_003: Okay, let's move on.

00:40:36 SPEAKER_001: And another thing that happens is that when you build these deep straight canals, they replace natural canals.

00:40:51 SPEAKER_001: Place natural canals, so you can see the percentage of natural canals in a certain area here.

00:41:06 SPEAKER_004: As as the percentage of canal area increases, the natural area decreases, and it's called channel thefts.

00:41:25 SPEAKER_001: And and you see in a lot of these images I'm showing you of the landscape, the natural channels just disappear over time because their flow is being stolen by the canals that are more efficient.

00:41:46 SPEAKER_001: So. this is a big process next, and we've done lots of different studies.

00:41:56 SPEAKER_004: This is a study I was involved in, looking at water flux in areas.

00:42:13 SPEAKER_004: And when they say managed, that means it's it's surrounded by levees and there are water control structures, so that most of the water flow becomes less.

00:42:30 SPEAKER_004: And in all of these cases, you see, in the managed marshes which are impounded, the flux of water is much less in general than in the natural.

00:42:53 SPEAKER_001: basins, which were the control studies.

00:42:58 SPEAKER_001: So you and and then that that water moving out of the marshes does all the things that I was talking about.

00:43:12 SPEAKER_001: It drains them.

00:43:15 SPEAKER_001: It helps aerate the soil.

00:43:24 SPEAKER_001: It brings in sediments.

00:43:29 SPEAKER_001: The marshes are more productive in the natural areas.

00:43:35 SPEAKER_001: So this is a big impact.

00:44:02 SPEAKER_001: Next, and and you find that the in in if you look at the hours flooded in a control site compared to the hours flooded and partially impounded, and it was the same,

00:44:20 SPEAKER_001: you would have that one-to-one line going down to the zero on the axis.

00:44:35 SPEAKER_001: What was found in this particular study is that the flooding duration in these marshes—this is for a one-month period in a marsh,

00:44:48 SPEAKER_005: a salt marsh in South Louisiana—it's they are they're flooded for much longer periods of time.

00:44:58 SPEAKER_005: Much longer periods of times, and marshes that are flooded like that are less healthy.

00:45:02 SPEAKER_005: Okay.

00:45:07 SPEAKER_005: And this is this is accretion over marker horizons.

00:45:14 SPEAKER_005: People have done this a lot of this.

00:45:28 SPEAKER_001: They lay down white clay on the surface of the marsh and come back after different periods and core down through it and measure the the vertical accretion.

00:45:42 SPEAKER_001: And here is Fenlac Terra is an area that where there was man.

00:45:56 SPEAKER_001: That where there was management taking places, which means it had levees around it and water control structures, and you can see here after a year, well,

00:46:22 SPEAKER_001: the accretion in the natural marshes was about five times higher, and and this is the organic matter in the organic matter accumulation in the unmanaged marshes was much higher,

00:46:41 SPEAKER_001: and that accumulation is very important because it gives rise to vertical growth of the marsh, which keeps the head of marshes head above water.

00:46:49 SPEAKER_001: Okay, next.

00:47:06 SPEAKER_001: Another example of and these are two different biodecad and biocavan, and you can see in almost all cases inside, which is the small darker bars, the short-term sediment deposition on the surface of the marsh,

00:47:30 SPEAKER_001: which you measure by putting filter pads and petri dishes, and going out and every couple of weeks and collecting them and weighing them,

00:47:50 SPEAKER_001: and you can see across the way it's very significant production and short-term sedimentation on the surface of the marsh.

00:47:57 SPEAKER_001: Okay, and here's four different areas.

00:48:02 SPEAKER_001: There've been lots of studies on this.

00:48:08 SPEAKER_001: These are four different areas.

00:48:12 SPEAKER_001: That's what the the letters are there.

00:48:30 SPEAKER_001: LL, for instance, is Little Lake, and and you see.

00:48:35 SPEAKER_001: so that the impounded areas, the there's the short-term sedimentation, and then the not and the natural areas are the light bars,

00:48:49 SPEAKER_001: and the vertical line there is the break-even.

00:49:01 SPEAKER_001: If it's if it's the deposition is below that, this marsh is unstable and on its way out.

00:49:14 SPEAKER_001: And so again, this is due to spoil banks, just like the oil and gas industry has done.

00:49:26 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:49:27 SPEAKER_001: Next.

00:49:36 SPEAKER_001: Also, if you dig dig a canal, here's a two pipeline canals in this in 1956 to 2015.

00:49:48 SPEAKER_001: The the spoil banks are heavier, so they sit on the Martian and depresses it, and you get these long linear canals along the the inside of the spoil bank,

00:50:09 SPEAKER_001: and which is you know due to the changed hydrology.

00:50:16 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:50:17 SPEAKER_001: And here's an example.

00:50:22 SPEAKER_001: Over time, I messed up my thing.

00:50:39 SPEAKER_003: I've got two eighty nines, but this just shows a marsh in South Louisiana where, and I'm identifying different parts of the photograph.

00:50:55 SPEAKER_003: And so, what I have here is eighty nine by two thousand and four.

00:51:02 SPEAKER_003: You see the the marshes are eroding on the edges, the ponds are starting to erode.

00:51:18 SPEAKER_003: You see in around the spoil banks or the around the canals. are the highest spoil banks, and by 2023, there's essentially nothing left here except the canals, spoil banks,

00:51:30 SPEAKER_003: and the rest of the marsh is gone.

00:51:39 SPEAKER_003: And this is an area of very intense oil and gas activity.

00:51:46 SPEAKER_003: Next, that's what I was telling you.

00:51:55 SPEAKER_003: The canals tend to erode over time, and it's one of one of major causes of wetland loss due to boat traffic and currents.

00:52:06 SPEAKER_003: Incurrence next.

00:52:17 SPEAKER_003: Okay, so we have induced subsidence due to things happening very deep down in the reservoirs, and you have reservoir collapse due to oil and gas withdrawal,

00:52:38 SPEAKER_003: secondary collapse due to slow drainage of water from bounding shales, so the the shales themselves start to start to compact,

00:52:55 SPEAKER_004: and there's also induced subsidence due to changes in pressure across faults. so there's induced fault, and I'll show you some examples of this.

00:53:08 SPEAKER_004: Next, all right, here's here's an area in South Louisiana.

00:53:15 SPEAKER_004: The you see these are names of oil and gas field.

00:53:27 SPEAKER_001: You see Leeville there on the left, on the right, Golden Meadow, Bully Camp, and Valentine.

00:53:31 SPEAKER_001: That's along Bayou Lafourche.

00:53:43 SPEAKER_004: That was an old channel of the Mississippi River, and over here on the other side is another is another old channel, and you can see. that.

00:53:58 SPEAKER_004: So those are the extents of the oil and gas fields, and the color on the dots.

00:54:04 SPEAKER_004: They were doing elevation surveys.

00:54:07 SPEAKER_001: Give you an idea of the subsidence rates.

00:54:14 SPEAKER_001: The subsidence rates in thirteen to fourteen, up to eighteen is this.

00:54:19 SPEAKER_003: This will kill the marsh very quickly.

00:54:32 SPEAKER_003: And the the hatch the the hatched areas are these areas of of high subsidence due to oil and gas activity in these oil fields—the cumulative impacts of all the things I'm talking about next—and so

00:54:46 SPEAKER_003: if you you this is a the the elevation lines along Bialafouche,

00:55:01 SPEAKER_003: and and for the period 1965 to 68, they were subsiding in general.

00:55:08 SPEAKER_003: You know, less tend.

00:55:22 SPEAKER_003: To almost zero, and the the highest rates of subsidence are in the oil and gas fields.

00:55:41 SPEAKER_003: But the second period of 1982 to 1993, three, and you're now in a period of declining production in the fields.

00:56:03 SPEAKER_008: The actual the oil and gas the subsidence rates are higher, so it occurs in two intervals: a slower interval near the oil and gas fields, and higher interval,

00:56:22 SPEAKER_008: higher subsidence rates.

00:56:28 SPEAKER_008: and over a wider area, okay.

00:56:40 SPEAKER_008: And this just is that same data, you know, separating the the elevation change in in the epoch one and epoch two, and then they're comparing the bottom.

00:57:16 SPEAKER_008: So the idea is that the subsidence rate actually increases as the oil and gas field becomes mature and as and as depleted, and you have slow drainage of fluids from shales.

00:57:34 SPEAKER_008: fault activation, reservoir compaction,

00:57:36 SPEAKER_008: time-dependent creep compaction, and acceleration after degree degree decrease in production.

00:57:44 SPEAKER_008: Okay, next.

00:57:55 SPEAKER_008: And and a guy in Korea who got his PhD at Stanford worked with us on this paper.

00:58:10 SPEAKER_008: I sent out a history of oil and gas life cycle of oil and gas fields in the Mississippi Delta.

00:58:24 SPEAKER_008: You first have a collapse of on the on the left there.

00:58:37 SPEAKER_008: You see, there's the sand, and you have this poroclastic compaction, and with shales.

00:58:53 SPEAKER_008: And as long as there's no there's no you're not taking anything out, they're in at this high high pressure equilibrium.

00:59:12 SPEAKER_001: But then as you as you pump oil out of the the sands, you get this initial compaction and. then during the latter part of production,

00:59:30 SPEAKER_001: what you're doing is you're continuing to pump because there's still oil here, even if it's depleted.

00:59:38 SPEAKER_001: And then there's slow drainage from the bounding shales, and you get the second period of higher compaction, and it spreads over a larger area.

01:00:03 SPEAKER_008: So the the area, the total area, would might be four or five times the area of the oil and gas field, and and he was co-author with us on our paper we wrote.

01:00:31 SPEAKER_003: Next, okay, then then the other thing that happens is what's called induced faulting, and these oil and gas fields before anybody you know went down and started drilling them, they there was high,

01:00:54 SPEAKER_003: very high pressure on either side of the fault, and these were faults that were have been active for million. millions of years, but that's very slow going along, and you know it's slowly compacting,

01:01:08 SPEAKER_003: but very slowly.

01:01:26 SPEAKER_003: But if you then draw the oil and gas out of one side, you draw this deep deep pressure down almost to zero in cases, so you have this enormous difference across the fault,

01:01:51 SPEAKER_003: and this induces faulting, and you can see these ponds out in the marshes that have straight lines. along one of their edges, and and it's because it's it's along a fault,

01:02:06 SPEAKER_003: and and lots of wetland loss happens there.

01:02:09 SPEAKER_003: And this is called pressure induced faulting, pressure lubrication.

01:02:14 SPEAKER_003: Okay, next.

01:02:19 SPEAKER_009: Okay, here's here's an area in east of the Mississippi River, south of New Orleans.

01:02:29 SPEAKER_009: You've got a bayou there called Long Bayou, and it is long and. straight as compared.

01:02:39 SPEAKER_009: You can see that all these natural basins are highly sinuous and curvy.

01:02:48 SPEAKER_009: Well, that's because Long Basin is sitting over a subsurface fault.

01:02:57 SPEAKER_009: So, and you can see all of the oil and gas canals south of Long Basin, and these are canals, oil banks.

01:03:08 SPEAKER_009: They're pumping out oil and gas, and they're giving rise to compaction.

01:03:15 SPEAKER_009: And as that happens, go to 1980 time.

01:03:20 SPEAKER_009: You see 89.

01:03:23 SPEAKER_009: You see the area starting to open. up.

01:03:28 SPEAKER_009: It continues 1998 by 2017.

01:03:33 SPEAKER_009: There's essentially nothing left except for a few spoil banks that still go above the water.

01:03:45 SPEAKER_009: And as it opens up, then you have longer fetch, then the waves start eroding too.

01:04:02 SPEAKER_009: So it's it's a complicated thing of how all these things come together, and the the downthrown side of the fault is what's going down,

01:04:17 SPEAKER_009: and the actually the upthrown side of the fault is north of Long Bayou.

01:04:29 SPEAKER_009: North of Longview, and it's actually pushed up, and it's very—it's much more resilient over time than the area below, which has essentially totally disappeared.

01:04:42 SPEAKER_009: I testified in a case on this, this oil and gas field.

01:04:48 SPEAKER_009: Okay, Barbara, do you want to ask your question?

01:04:51 SPEAKER_009: Yeah.

01:04:52 SPEAKER_009: Okay.

01:04:56 SPEAKER_009: Well, Barbara asked in the chat, "What's the pre-production displacement on these faults?"

01:05:02 SPEAKER_009: There, and and.

01:05:08 SPEAKER_009: In in in the the time of an oil and gas field, it's it's millimeters.

01:05:22 SPEAKER_009: I mean, it's very slow, and it's and it's something.

01:05:32 SPEAKER_009: There the the Mississippi Delta is riddled with falls.

01:05:41 SPEAKER_009: I mean, there are thousands of them, and they run.

01:05:57 SPEAKER_009: There there are all sorts of different things that that cause them, but it's mainly because that it's a very unconsolidated sediment mass with heavy on one side and another, and all.

01:06:10 SPEAKER_009: Side another, and all sorts of things like that are happening.

01:06:25 SPEAKER_009: The salt domes are coming up slowly, but it's it's millimeters, you know.

01:06:30 SPEAKER_009: I don't know for century.

01:06:37 SPEAKER_009: I mean, it it's not very fast, and the the wetlands can can live with that kind of thing.

01:06:51 SPEAKER_009: This fault, in about twenty years, we lost about twenty centimeters, and that's enough to kill a marsh.

01:07:08 SPEAKER_009: So, no. What I was asking, John, before any drilling. at all, what what was the displacement of the strata along one of these faults that you were looking at?

01:07:24 SPEAKER_009: It's it's millimeters.

01:07:27 SPEAKER_009: No, no, no, not a displacement rate.

01:07:30 SPEAKER_009: What?

01:07:35 SPEAKER_009: Not a displacement rate, but how how how far were the the sediments actually displaced?

01:07:41 SPEAKER_009: Place could you tell?

01:07:45 SPEAKER_009: You you mean in naturally or because of oil and gas?

01:07:49 SPEAKER_009: Nat naturally before they started drilling.

01:08:03 SPEAKER_009: Well, it was it was mill it was millimeters on any time scale we think about, you know, and and and it's it's episodic, so it might slip, uh, you know, five centimeters, and then it,

01:08:23 SPEAKER_003: and it's you know, and it's it's nothing happens for a century or maybe longer, and then it'll slip again, and you know, right.

01:08:31 SPEAKER_003: There's this continual readjustment throughout the Mississippi Delta, which is, which is 500 kilometers wide.

01:08:44 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, and I understand this is not like the kind of faults we're used to seeing go across California, where they're huge and have moved.

01:09:03 SPEAKER_009: Just to stick my Barbara, just to just to stick my nose in this.

01:09:09 SPEAKER_009: Right.

01:09:14 SPEAKER_009: The other thing is, at the same time, the Mississippi River is laid.

01:09:24 SPEAKER_009: The Mississippi River is laying down new sediment, right?

01:09:46 SPEAKER_009: And basically, when they're drilling for the oil and gas, the rock is porous like a sponge, and you remove the hydrocarbons, and basically the overrocked overburden crushes it and crushes out the pores,

01:09:58 SPEAKER_010: and that's what the subsidence is.

01:10:04 SPEAKER_010: But before they took out the oil and gas, under the Mississippi River is steadily laying down sediment, mud stuff.

01:10:22 SPEAKER_010: So even if there was subsidence, you wouldn't notice it because the the river is laying down so much new mud.

01:10:34 SPEAKER_010: But since they're taking up oil and gas, it overwhelms the what the rivers.

01:10:45 SPEAKER_010: Overwhelms what the rivers do, but the geologists know know they can they've estimated what subsidence rates in different geological periods.

01:11:00 SPEAKER_010: But you're talking about things occurring on millions of years versus a few decades.

01:11:07 SPEAKER_010: I wish Art Berman was on this discussion.

01:11:18 SPEAKER_010: He could probably answer a lot of this for us.

01:11:26 SPEAKER_010: That's his area of expertise.

01:11:28 SPEAKER_010: Yeah, Art and I have talked about this stuff.

01:11:33 SPEAKER_011: Okay, next.

01:11:37 SPEAKER_011: I think we're getting close to being done.

01:11:40 SPEAKER_011: Okay.

01:11:41 SPEAKER_011: All right.

01:11:42 SPEAKER_011: Next.

01:11:43 SPEAKER_011: I'm trying there.

01:11:46 SPEAKER_011: All right, and here's just another example.

01:12:04 SPEAKER_011: There's a big oil gas field up in northern Netherlands, and and you can see that over the vertical rates of subsidence is high six millimeters per year in the middle of that field,

01:12:37 SPEAKER_011: and current eustatic sea level rise is between three and four, so that you know that's even higher, and that would be added to it, but from Added to it, but for most of the Netherlands,

01:12:58 SPEAKER_011: it's very low.

01:13:00 SPEAKER_011: So it's just another example.

01:13:09 SPEAKER_011: This occurs all over the world in deltas that have oil and gas in them.

01:13:22 SPEAKER_011: The Niger is one that that has big oil and gas fields, and you get similar kinds of problems.

01:13:27 SPEAKER_011: Okay.

01:13:28 SPEAKER_011: All right.

01:13:35 SPEAKER_011: I'm not going to talk much about toxicity because that's not my field.

01:13:42 SPEAKER_011: But the biggest source of toxicity is the producer.

01:13:45 SPEAKER_011: Is the produced water the brines?

01:13:49 SPEAKER_011: It has high levels of salt.

01:13:55 SPEAKER_011: Sometimes it's saturated.

01:14:05 SPEAKER_011: Metals, naturally occurring radioactive materials, monocyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polycyclic, and miscellaneous oil and gas chemicals.

01:14:22 SPEAKER_011: You know, some of this, much of it, is coming from the hydrocarbons that are down there already, and then they pump all this stuff down, drilling muds, and and to enhance recovery,

01:14:49 SPEAKER_011: and so all that comes up, and that stuff comes up, and it's just awful, and it's pervasive across the Mississippi Delta, and what to do about it is, is you can't just dig it out,

01:15:08 SPEAKER_010: and a lot of people are talking about we just need to bury it or something.

01:15:22 SPEAKER_003: But anyway, this is really a widespread problem, and I think this is my last slide.

01:15:27 SPEAKER_003: Yeah.

01:15:34 SPEAKER_011: So so. the other thing that having having a big oil and gas industry in a place like Louisiana is it warps the government.

01:15:44 SPEAKER_011: It warps the society.

01:15:54 SPEAKER_003: You know, you didn't need to have a college education to get rich down there working on the rigs and stuff, and and that continues today.

01:16:10 SPEAKER_003: Even though the oil and gas industry, they at one time were providing fifty percent of the budget of the state.

01:16:28 SPEAKER_003: Now it's down less than five percent. but they still have all these supporters, and I've been involved in a series of lawsuits trying to get them to repair the coast,

01:16:41 SPEAKER_003: to pay for restoring the coast, and and with regard to EROI, you know, I haven't made any calculations,

01:16:56 SPEAKER_010: but if you're going to get a true net energy analysis of a place like the Mississippi Delta, you've got to look at what it costs what to fix the delta from all these damages,

01:17:12 SPEAKER_010: and I think it would it would almost be negative in a lot of times places.

01:17:19 SPEAKER_010: So anyway, that's my story.

01:17:23 SPEAKER_010: John does have put this in there.

01:17:28 SPEAKER_010: What's going on the Permian out there in West Texas?

01:17:36 SPEAKER_010: They have a produced water problem, and it's gotten so bad.

01:17:46 SPEAKER_010: And they're they're injecting that produced water down the ground and causing earthquakes and so forth.

01:18:02 SPEAKER_010: But it's gotten so bad that the Railroad Commission is basically basically put together a whole series of permits.

01:18:13 SPEAKER_010: So it's making it.

01:18:18 SPEAKER_010: very difficult to basically get rid of the produced water.

01:18:32 SPEAKER_007: So they're being forced into recycling the water and also basically cleaning up the water.

01:18:47 SPEAKER_007: And the reason why is because Midland, Texas, is starting to poison the water table and and the people.

01:19:01 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, it's gotten so bad the Railroad Commission's finally stepped in.

01:19:11 SPEAKER_007: Well, everybody's screaming blood and murder because it's having an impact in producing oil.

01:19:22 SPEAKER_007: Because every barrel they produce, they're producing fifteen or twenty barrels of produced water.

01:19:36 SPEAKER_007: That's that's that's right.

01:19:39 SPEAKER_007: So this and and up.

01:19:48 SPEAKER_003: So this and up until eighty nineteen eighty nine is when they started requiring all companies to reinject, and that's well past the peak production.

01:20:07 SPEAKER_003: So enormous volumes of this water went into the shallow waters and wetlands of the of the coast.

01:20:14 SPEAKER_003: And and give an idea.

01:20:24 SPEAKER_003: I mean, I mean, oil companies they're not they're definitely not philanthropies, and they're not not too hip.

01:20:32 SPEAKER_003: But but they're actually cleaning up this water.

01:20:42 SPEAKER_003: And here's the reason why: because they're having a problem with their employees.

01:20:48 SPEAKER_003: People go won't go.

01:20:58 SPEAKER_013: People don't won't go work out there because of this water issue, the toxic water, because they're afraid they're going to drink well water or something be contaminated.

01:21:14 SPEAKER_013: So now the oil companies are being forced into into dealing with this problem finally, but that's what it took.

01:21:21 SPEAKER_013: Yeah, and then that contributes to lowering the net energy.

01:21:32 SPEAKER_013: All of that.

01:21:35 SPEAKER_013: Yeah, it's all true.

01:21:41 SPEAKER_013: I see.

01:21:41 SPEAKER_013: Iver has.

01:21:45 SPEAKER_013: Iver, would you like to ask your question?

01:21:46 SPEAKER_013: Yeah.

01:21:52 SPEAKER_007: What is the natural sea level rise in Louisiana?

01:22:04 SPEAKER_010: I know it's about two inches a decade here now in Maine, and we're dealing with having to raise some of our roads and things.

01:22:14 SPEAKER_010: But what is underneath it all?

01:22:17 SPEAKER_010: What is the natural?

01:22:24 SPEAKER_007: I saw it was seventeen inches since 1950 or something.

01:22:37 SPEAKER_007: But I mean, how much of that is things sinking down, and how much of what's the natural sea level rise?

01:22:49 SPEAKER_010: Well. it's it's back at the beginning of the twentieth century.

01:22:55 SPEAKER_010: It was about a millimeter, a millimeter and a half a year.

01:23:04 SPEAKER_010: Now it's three or four, but that's variable all around the world.

01:23:17 SPEAKER_004: And they're estimated that that you know we could get a a centimeter or more a year by the mid-century or the end of the century.

01:23:31 SPEAKER_004: It's it's it's it's essentially, I think, too late to stop this climate thing.

01:23:40 SPEAKER_004: I think we're passing points that we're not going to come back from.

01:23:55 SPEAKER_004: Yeah, I mean we're dealing with it here, and it is unbelievable because you begin to realize they're talking about raising some of the roads here in Maine, Deer Isle Causeway, four point three feet,

01:24:17 SPEAKER_004: or you know five feet, probably a meter and a half, right, just to keep you driving until the end of the century, just to get through.

01:24:34 SPEAKER_003: Go through, and by then we'll run out of oil to power a car, and I guess everybody would be driving electric vehicles then.

01:24:41 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, of course.

01:24:46 SPEAKER_003: I was talking to the fishermen out here, and you know what they said?

01:24:52 SPEAKER_003: They go, "Well, that's great, more bottom for me."

01:25:04 SPEAKER_003: So I have some questions about the early part of your presentation, and they're asking, "Do you know how deep the Mississippi change was during the Pleistocene?"

01:25:18 SPEAKER_003: and how far back towards Vicksburg?

01:25:29 SPEAKER_003: The well, I'll tell you that the river, the bottom of the river, goes above sea level north of sea level, north of Vicksburg, right around the the the Arkansas state line,

01:25:46 SPEAKER_003: and that area was in an embayment right after sea after after the last glaciation,

01:26:03 SPEAKER_003: and there was a there was a there's a big Indian site up there called Poverty Point that that just got became a World Heritage Site, and at that time when they were formed,

01:26:14 SPEAKER_003: that it would still had a direct connection to the Gulf of Mexico,

01:26:27 SPEAKER_003: and and they were one of the few state level organizations that could live off the natural environment without a a major staple grain crop.

01:26:38 SPEAKER_003: And another YouTube question. from Kitty Green: Why does it matter?

01:26:45 SPEAKER_010: And if it's constantly changing, Neposodil, why does this even matter?

01:26:55 SPEAKER_010: Well, we we're we're losing one of the major natural space-wise and more productive ecosystems in the United States.

01:27:12 SPEAKER_010: I mean, we should care about that.

01:27:17 SPEAKER_010: And it's always a mystery to me.

01:27:26 SPEAKER_010: You know, people like to look at Yosemite with the big mountain.

01:27:34 SPEAKER_010: but that wasn't a very productive area.

01:27:51 SPEAKER_010: South Louisiana, if it fails, the the the national economy fails because all that all that coal and grain and stuff comes down the Mississippi River,

01:28:11 SPEAKER_010: and and there's there's a good chance that it might fail in this century.

01:28:22 SPEAKER_010: Steve has a question.

01:28:25 SPEAKER_014: Go ahead, Steve.

01:28:29 SPEAKER_014: Yeah, John, as a layperson, I don't understand you know how this is done.

01:28:38 SPEAKER_014: Looking at those interesting slides you had, do you?

01:28:46 SPEAKER_014: It's like they dig the canals, like the first slide you showed.

01:28:55 SPEAKER_014: There's like a circular canal, and then there's all these little tiny canals.

01:29:03 SPEAKER_014: That's where the oil, I guess.

01:29:17 SPEAKER_014: Well, so they go in and they dredge, and and that's where they have the spoils.

01:29:25 SPEAKER_014: They get to where they're going to drill, and then you see another little small canal.

01:29:25 SPEAKER_014: And so what?

01:29:25 SPEAKER_014: When over time, fifty years, you see the marsh disappear.

01:29:26 SPEAKER_014: How deep is Here, how deep is that water?

01:29:26 SPEAKER_014: I guess now, and is it disappeared due to the subsidence or because?

01:29:26 SPEAKER_014: Yeah, we don't we don't see the marsh anymore, and now the spoils are a little bit left.

01:29:26 SPEAKER_014: How did that change?

01:29:27 SPEAKER_014: Is it mostly due to the subsidence?

01:29:28 SPEAKER_014: Well, in a sense, yes, and but there's all these things affecting subsidence, and you the the salt marshes can't or have a lower productivity, and they. can't creep vertically, going upward.

01:29:28 SPEAKER_014: And and oil and gas augments the natural rates of subsidence significantly, and and those areas of marsh that have turned to water, you you couldn't go out there in an outward motorboat.

01:29:28 SPEAKER_014: They just they might be a foot deep, foot and a half deep, but it marsh won't grow in that.

01:29:29 SPEAKER_014: It has to be intertidal, and they're permanently flooded.

01:29:29 SPEAKER_014: So one one last follow up. question, I know the toxins maybe dealt with, but how do you how how is that fixed?

01:29:29 SPEAKER_014: How can man fix that problem now?

01:29:29 SPEAKER_014: What the toxins?

01:29:30 SPEAKER_014: No, the let's let's forget the toxins. the the the messing up and the flooding of the marshes.

01:29:30 SPEAKER_014: They're no longer working, correct?

01:29:30 SPEAKER_014: Well, the other thing is, is the Mississippi's largely levied, and so that we've stopped getting sediments from the Mississippi River, and so. if you can get sediments back in there by whatever mechanism,

01:29:31 SPEAKER_014: you can fill in those areas and areas in the Louisiana coast where there is an abundant supply of sediments, like at the mouth of the Atchafalaya River,

01:29:32 SPEAKER_014: which carries about a third of the total flow of the river, Mississippi River.

01:29:32 SPEAKER_014: Those marshes are not disappearing; they're actually growing upward, and they're very healthy.

01:29:33 SPEAKER_014: Healthy.

01:29:33 SPEAKER_014: Okay.

01:29:34 SPEAKER_014: Thank you.

01:29:34 SPEAKER_014: Dusty has a question.

01:29:34 SPEAKER_014: Go ahead, Dusty.

01:29:34 SPEAKER_014: Has a question?

01:29:37 SPEAKER_014: Go ahead, Susti.

01:29:38 SPEAKER_014: My my question is kind of along the lines of Steve's question.

01:29:38 SPEAKER_014: Is it seems like a lot of times when we have problems that humans face, there's different ways looking at it.

01:29:39 SPEAKER_014: Like some people will kind of like have the just stop oil look method look, or you know maybe like ultra environment environmentalism where they don't want any impact from human activity whatsoever.

01:29:39 SPEAKER_014: And then you might have on the other side. extreme, hardcore, you know, extractive capitalism too.

01:29:40 SPEAKER_014: On one end, where is kind of the balance here?

01:29:40 SPEAKER_014: On this kind of like Steve mentioned, like, are there things that they can do?

01:29:40 SPEAKER_014: Trying to extract, like, what is the is is there a balance to find here, or is there not balance?

01:29:41 SPEAKER_014: That's kind of my question.

01:29:41 SPEAKER_014: Well, I mean, there are things you can do to help restore the.

01:29:42 SPEAKER_014: Mississippi Delta, and you have to engage all of the natural energies.

01:29:42 SPEAKER_014: And every time a front passes, you get these high suspended sediments up in the water column.

01:29:42 SPEAKER_014: If you can reconnect that with areas that have subsided, that's one way.

01:29:42 SPEAKER_014: We have a very large scale restoration program that largely isn't working, but it's you know there's no simple answer there for that.

01:29:43 SPEAKER_014: Okay, so I'm seeing Charlie and then Dan.

01:29:44 SPEAKER_014: Okay, Charlie, go ahead.

01:29:44 SPEAKER_014: It seems to me that the answer to this is, we cannot have eight billion people at the standard of living that we have without drawing down our total bank account,

01:29:45 SPEAKER_014: the environmental bank account in particular here, including the Louisiana land.

01:29:46 SPEAKER_014: If you did an EROI, including the loss of the coastal productivity and so forth, which I would not advise doing.

01:29:46 SPEAKER_014: By the way, but if you did something like that, there's a way you could do it correctly.

01:29:46 SPEAKER_014: It would be probably a deficit, as our change in the atmosphere is a deficit.

01:29:48 SPEAKER_014: So we just have to have it.

01:29:48 SPEAKER_014: It's just important that you have to understand that we're. not living on interest.

01:29:48 SPEAKER_014: We're living on capital, and and that's part of the capital that we're living on.

01:29:48 SPEAKER_014: Now, all kinds of organisms live on capital.

01:29:49 SPEAKER_014: You know, some kind of a fly comes across a carcass.

01:29:50 SPEAKER_014: He's living on, on he and his offspring are living on the capital of the carcass.

01:29:51 SPEAKER_014: But when the carcass is gone, then Has gone, then, then that's it.

01:29:51 SPEAKER_014: And so we're living.

01:29:52 SPEAKER_014: We've generated a civilization that's operating on capital, draining capital.

01:29:52 SPEAKER_014: I think any organism will do that, given the opportunity, and and ultimately, and time, it it pays the consequences.

01:29:52 SPEAKER_014: And that, of course, is what John and I and all of us here have been been saying for a long time that we have to. understand that we're living on capital.

01:29:52 SPEAKER_014: Yeah, I agree.

01:29:52 SPEAKER_014: Dan, yeah, sure.

01:29:52 SPEAKER_014: I'm going to look at it from a from a another different point.

01:29:53 SPEAKER_014: Most people will probably probably appreciate.

01:29:53 SPEAKER_014: I'm not necessarily considered an environmentalist.

01:29:53 SPEAKER_014: I'm more what's called a conservationist.

01:29:54 SPEAKER_014: And conservationists were concerned with hunting and fishing, but what's going on?

01:29:54 SPEAKER_014: in the Everglades there in the Mississippi Delta that affects food production.

01:29:54 SPEAKER_014: So my only question is, do you like seafood?

01:29:55 SPEAKER_014: That's kind of an important thing.

01:29:55 SPEAKER_014: Let me give an example.

01:29:57 SPEAKER_014: When they had the Deepwater Horizon accident back in 2010, it affected seafood production for years.

01:30:00 SPEAKER_014: Right.

01:30:01 SPEAKER_014: So I'm making it very personal.

01:30:02 SPEAKER_014: So basically, if they're having an activity out there in the Delta, and this is very important for not just all those species, but but food production for, like I said,

01:30:02 SPEAKER_014: if if you enjoy seafood. so the point is, it goes back to we need to be better stewards of our own planet and realize that we do have an impact on our environment,

01:30:03 SPEAKER_014: and that's what I wanted to say.

01:30:03 SPEAKER_014: Yeah, yeah.

01:30:04 SPEAKER_014: I I had a follow up question to Dan's, and in terms of, do you know what is produced by these marshes that is either used directly or indirectly by?

01:30:04 SPEAKER_014: I know one of them is just is just shrimp, for example.

01:30:04 SPEAKER_014: Just as a shrimp, for example, you match the movie Forrest Gump.

01:30:05 SPEAKER_014: Remember when he was working with with Lieutenant Dan?

01:30:05 SPEAKER_014: They were on a shrimp boat out there in the bayou off the coast of Louisiana.

01:30:05 SPEAKER_014: You know, that's as personal as I can make it.

01:30:06 SPEAKER_014: Well, I mean, Dave Bacher and others have done analysis of ecosystem goods and services, and they come up with a value of like tens of billions of dollars a year,

01:30:09 SPEAKER_014: and all of these different things in a capitalist.

01:30:09 SPEAKER_014: Than a capital asset value in excess of a trillion dollars from the Mississippi Delta.

01:30:10 SPEAKER_014: Isn't Louisiana like the number two seafood state?

01:30:10 SPEAKER_011: I think it still is.

01:30:10 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, yeah, very much so.

01:30:11 SPEAKER_011: So yes, this is a very personal thing that does affect all of us.

01:30:11 SPEAKER_011: Alaska, Louisiana, and Texas are the biggies.

01:30:12 SPEAKER_011: Yeah.

01:30:13 SPEAKER_011: Okay.

01:30:14 SPEAKER_011: I wanted to ask.

01:30:14 SPEAKER_011: Can I say something though?

01:30:14 SPEAKER_011: Go ahead.

01:30:15 SPEAKER_011: Something though, this is going to sound a little mean, but I was thinking, New Orleans right now is two feet underwater, right below sea level, and all these marshes,

01:30:15 SPEAKER_011: all these marshes are really close or right at sea level, and by twenty fifty, we're going to have another foot of water on top of everything just from sea level rise.

01:30:17 SPEAKER_011: So I guess I'm asking, is it time to do a little mitigation or figure it out because these are not going to be marshes by 2050.

01:30:17 SPEAKER_011: They're going to be shallow parts of the ocean.

01:30:17 SPEAKER_011: Well, yeah, I agree.

01:30:18 SPEAKER_011: I, you know, it may be.

01:30:19 SPEAKER_011: We may be.

01:30:19 SPEAKER_011: One thing it might save us is we get to a point where we can't afford to keep the levees up, and then the river reoccupies its basin.

01:30:19 SPEAKER_011: And yeah, I think we we had the John John point on something important that there there is a natural mitigation system that. is let that river do what it does best.

01:30:19 SPEAKER_011: Well, it'll eat almost all of New Orleans because there are parts of New Orleans that are eight feet under sea level.

01:30:19 SPEAKER_011: So, and and other towns also are kind of like they have like a big levee around them.

01:30:20 SPEAKER_011: So it seems to me they got to figure out some way of pulling back.

01:30:20 SPEAKER_011: And it's you know that's mean, but if you can't save the place, what do you do?

01:30:20 SPEAKER_011: A guy Tulane just published a paper, and he said we have. to start considering moving New Orleans."

01:30:20 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, I don't know how that would happen.

01:30:20 SPEAKER_011: Well, I know there's already papers out there in regards to the Mississippi River and the High River because of the dikes and so forth that we've cut back in the amount of fresh water,

01:30:20 SPEAKER_011: you know, wetland next to the river,

01:30:20 SPEAKER_011: and that's a that's causing the floods that we've been having yearly on a basis even worse because those flat those flatlands have been levied off and turned into farmland, and so yeah,

01:30:21 SPEAKER_011: if we're not able. to maintain those dikes, let the river go back to how it normally was.

01:30:21 SPEAKER_011: It'll, it'll, it'll fix a lot of these problems for for us.

01:30:21 SPEAKER_011: Is what I'm trying to say.

01:30:22 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, the ocean.

01:30:22 SPEAKER_011: I I was wondering about Monro.

01:30:23 SPEAKER_011: I've heard.

01:30:23 SPEAKER_011: Oh, sorry.

01:30:23 SPEAKER_011: I've heard that there are three three real cities in the United States: New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco.

01:30:23 SPEAKER_011: The rest is Cincinnati.

01:30:24 SPEAKER_011: To Cincinnati, so one can look at it as a culture as well.

01:30:25 SPEAKER_011: So, John Peach, did you happen to have your presentation ready that you wanted to do the update on?

01:30:25 SPEAKER_011: I didn't actually make a presentation.

01:30:25 SPEAKER_011: I was just going to say that I attended the online Energy Institute meeting.

01:30:26 SPEAKER_011: I guess was last week.

01:30:26 SPEAKER_011: This was last week, and it's kind of disappointed.

01:30:27 SPEAKER_011: Actually, they seem to play around with statistics quite a bit, and you know, make everything look very rosy.

01:30:28 SPEAKER_011: My impression was that they were kind of cherry picking an awful lot and saying things like, you know,

01:30:28 SPEAKER_011: the the rate of increase in solar and wind is much higher than the rate of increase in or percentage rate of increase in in fossil fuels,

01:30:28 SPEAKER_011: but you know if you look at the the totals, fossil fuels are still increasing much faster than solar wind.

01:30:28 SPEAKER_011: And then they they did an awful lot of country cherry picking, you know, saying, "Oh, China's doing all this wonderful stuff," but if you actually look at the the data.

01:30:28 SPEAKER_011: There's no rapid electrification of China, anyway.

01:30:29 SPEAKER_011: I mean, they're they're still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

01:30:29 SPEAKER_011: And then, of course, there's there's no you know real in depth thinking about what are the consequences of all this, right?

01:30:29 SPEAKER_011: Are we well?

01:30:30 SPEAKER_011: The first question that I've been having is, do we really have the technology to make an energy transition or not?

01:30:30 SPEAKER_011: And this would mean, you know, assume we completely abandon fossil fuels somehow.

01:30:31 SPEAKER_011: Can we keep producing other forms of energy without the fossil fuels?

01:30:31 SPEAKER_011: And we don't have any.

01:30:31 SPEAKER_011: I don't.

01:30:31 SPEAKER_011: I don't know of anybody that's doing this end to end that would justify that assumption.

01:30:32 SPEAKER_011: Then the second question that I have is, where is the evidence that we would actually transition from one energy source to another?

01:30:32 SPEAKER_011: And my point there is that energy is so valuable to us that we don't ever abandon anything.

01:30:32 SPEAKER_011: We we always add to our existing totals.

01:30:32 SPEAKER_011: And then what?

01:30:32 SPEAKER_011: What are the consequences?

01:30:33 SPEAKER_011: You know, how much more damage?

01:30:33 SPEAKER_011: You know, this is the sort of thing that that John was just talking about.

01:30:33 SPEAKER_011: Look at the damage that is being done just by the oil and gas industries, but you know everything else is an extractive industry as well.

01:30:33 SPEAKER_011: So that's also damaging.

01:30:34 SPEAKER_011: And you know, what are the consequences of doing this?

01:30:34 SPEAKER_011: And so this is kind of.

01:30:34 SPEAKER_011: What I was missing from their presentation seemed like it was just very sort of rah rah, and not not getting you know serious thought.

01:30:34 SPEAKER_011: So anyway, no no real presentation.

01:30:34 SPEAKER_011: John, can you say again?

01:30:36 SPEAKER_011: Who who did the assessment you're talking about?

01:30:36 SPEAKER_011: Who?

01:30:36 SPEAKER_011: Oh, this is the Energy Institute.

01:30:36 SPEAKER_011: You know, they're it used to be the BP World Energy or World. statistical review every year, and now they turn it over to the Energy Institute.

01:30:37 SPEAKER_011: Yep.

01:30:37 SPEAKER_011: So there's there's a lot of hypocrisy in all this.

01:30:37 SPEAKER_011: Charlie and I wrote a book in 2016 about sustainability of different regions of the U.S. And you know, and you we one of this and we chose areas around the country to represent different situations.

01:30:38 SPEAKER_011: And Portland, Oregon was one of them, and the the Gulf Coast area of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Houston was another, and you know,

01:30:38 SPEAKER_011: if you know places like Portland use all the stuff that we produce in Louisiana, all this plastic and these petrochemicals, and the you know,

01:30:38 SPEAKER_011: and and and and we take the the you know we take the pollution, and they they take the finished product, and that happens happens all over the world.

01:30:39 SPEAKER_011: It's been the the Over the world, and call themselves sustainable.

01:30:39 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, yeah, and that's nonsense.

01:30:39 SPEAKER_011: It's complete nonsense.

01:30:39 SPEAKER_011: Yes, and it's sort of like the more recent uproar over data centers.

01:30:40 SPEAKER_011: You know, um, I can understand why you might not like a data center because you know uses a lot of energy, uses a lot of materials and whatnot.

01:30:41 SPEAKER_011: But our entire modern society is running on data centers, right?

01:30:41 SPEAKER_011: So I think if you took that away, you'd be very surprised at how inefficient life suddenly becomes.

01:30:42 SPEAKER_011: John just John just to add to that, what you're talking about, because that's kind of the business I'm in.

01:30:42 SPEAKER_011: If you Google BIS Space AI, and you're going to find out the Bank for International Settlements, or is actually forecasting a financial crisis in regards to those AI data centers.

01:30:42 SPEAKER_011: And what's going on is the the tragic.

01:30:43 SPEAKER_011: Is the the tragedy that's going on in the Persian Gulf is leading corporations to cut back on spending, and they're cutting spending on AI.

01:30:43 SPEAKER_011: And right now, they're forecasting there's probably going to be a three or four trillion dollar default because they built those AI data centers on on corporate bonds.

01:30:44 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, I've been kind of yeah, data center thing's going to end real quickly here.

01:30:45 SPEAKER_011: Is what I'm trying to tell.

01:30:46 SPEAKER_011: Yeah.

01:30:47 SPEAKER_011: Anyway, that's about all I had on the.

01:30:47 SPEAKER_011: Okay, I wanted to give Roger Bentley a chance, and then there's a YouTube follow-up for Simon.

01:30:47 SPEAKER_011: After, okay, Roger, go ahead.

01:30:47 SPEAKER_011: Thank you, Andrew.

01:30:48 SPEAKER_011: Can you hear me?

01:30:48 SPEAKER_011: My microphone never used to work.

01:30:49 SPEAKER_011: Yes, it's working now.

01:30:49 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, brilliant.

01:30:49 SPEAKER_011: I have no idea why, but thank you very kindly.

01:30:50 SPEAKER_011: Another yet brilliant talk by everybody.

01:30:51 SPEAKER_011: So pleased.

01:30:51 SPEAKER_011: The first thing to say is I. see Jean went away because he couldn't make his microphone work.

01:30:51 SPEAKER_011: That's correct, isn't it?

01:30:51 SPEAKER_011: Yes, yes, that's what happened.

01:30:51 SPEAKER_011: Then the story is this: Andrew, just for future, I've been working with him closely on the stuff he was going to prepare.

01:30:52 SPEAKER_011: We're actually doing a paper for Charlie Hall's special issue on on frontiers of science, so we're working on a paper.

01:30:53 SPEAKER_011: I have to have it finished in two weeks, so I'm pretty close to what Jean has done.

01:30:53 SPEAKER_011: First of all. please practice with Jean.

01:30:53 SPEAKER_011: It's very hot where he lives at the moment, poor man.

01:30:54 SPEAKER_011: But practice with him on the sound.

01:30:54 SPEAKER_011: So if you do it again next one, it's a very important presentation he's got.

01:30:55 SPEAKER_011: It's global world fossil fuels, and it's got some brilliant stuff in it.

01:30:55 SPEAKER_011: So, but if you can't get him to talk, then he can do his slides, and I'm happy to talk over.

01:30:55 SPEAKER_011: Okay, cool.

01:30:55 SPEAKER_011: He should send his presentation to you guys, to Andre and. let him put it up.

01:30:57 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, I have it.

01:30:57 SPEAKER_011: I have it.

01:30:57 SPEAKER_011: We didn't have any one.

01:30:57 SPEAKER_011: It's the sound.

01:30:57 SPEAKER_011: It's the sound.

01:30:58 SPEAKER_011: Okay, it was the sound.

01:30:58 SPEAKER_011: And usually his sound works just fine.

01:30:58 SPEAKER_011: It was just this one time that for some reason it wasn't working for him.

01:30:59 SPEAKER_011: Yeah.

01:30:59 SPEAKER_011: So see, see how it goes, Andre.

01:30:59 SPEAKER_011: That's one to say.

01:30:59 SPEAKER_011: Two, two.

01:31:00 SPEAKER_011: Hello, the people on the group that I know, Charlie.

01:31:00 SPEAKER_011: I'm working hard on the papers for your paper.

01:31:01 SPEAKER_011: I'm not a lazy man, so slowly we'll get them done.

01:31:01 SPEAKER_011: That's two.

01:31:01 SPEAKER_011: John Day, I appreciate what you said.

01:31:01 SPEAKER_011: Very correct.

01:31:02 SPEAKER_011: Energy Institute is my institute.

01:31:02 SPEAKER_011: I'm a formerly a member of.

01:31:02 SPEAKER_011: I pay my writing subscription every year.

01:31:02 SPEAKER_011: Member of the Energy Institute.

01:31:02 SPEAKER_011: Don't knock them too much.

01:31:03 SPEAKER_011: They're in a slightly difficult position, as we say.

01:31:03 SPEAKER_011: They took over the BPI statistical.

01:31:03 SPEAKER_011: Can you hear me, Andreas?

01:31:03 SPEAKER_011: Yes, yes, we can hear you.

01:31:04 SPEAKER_011: Yeah.

01:31:04 SPEAKER_011: They took over this thingy thingy, but of course, John Day and Charlie and others of you know and.

01:31:05 SPEAKER_011: Charlie knows.

01:31:05 SPEAKER_011: The question you raised, John Day, at the end: Can we move to a world without fossil fuels, or how painful, or what happens, and how many people survive and don't?

01:31:05 SPEAKER_011: Is one of the biggest questions in the world.

01:31:07 SPEAKER_011: A number of people have started to address it a bit.

01:31:09 SPEAKER_011: Charlie had a good student from was it China the other day who did a did a presentation and some calculations, but it's. a big question.

01:31:09 SPEAKER_011: Not technically very difficult.

01:31:09 SPEAKER_011: It needs it needs Charlie's energy return.

01:31:09 SPEAKER_011: It needs Jean Laherez how much oil there is.

01:31:09 SPEAKER_011: It needs it needs the presentation we've just done on the on the biofuels and the and the just the disturbances and all the rest of it.

01:31:10 SPEAKER_011: They've all to go to go into a model, but it's not a desperately difficult model.

01:31:10 SPEAKER_011: It's probably less difficult than the financial institute boys have.

01:31:11 SPEAKER_011: But they have lots of money. and we have very few good PhD students working on it.

01:31:11 SPEAKER_011: But Charlie has some, and in time we're going to have to answer the question.

01:31:11 SPEAKER_011: As Charlie knows, we either go backwards.

01:31:11 SPEAKER_011: I love the Seachurch City in Charlie; it looks wonderful.

01:31:11 SPEAKER_011: Either we go backwards, or we survive, or we go forwards.

01:31:12 SPEAKER_011: And who, Ruddy knows, we've got to do the sums.

01:31:12 SPEAKER_011: And Andrew, your presentations are key, key parts to doing the sums of the big question that John Day you answered, and God.

01:31:12 SPEAKER_011: One day you answered, and going back to the main topic, very interesting.

01:31:12 SPEAKER_011: A bit on on on on offshore oil in Mississippi.

01:31:13 SPEAKER_011: Thanks, folks.

01:31:13 SPEAKER_011: Absolutely brilliant.

01:31:14 SPEAKER_011: I've got to go, but absolutely brilliant.

01:31:14 SPEAKER_011: Okay, thank you, Roger.

01:31:16 SPEAKER_011: YouTube viewer was wondering if you knew where the hard coal is coming from.

01:31:17 SPEAKER_011: Oh, you're going now, Roger?

01:31:18 SPEAKER_011: Okay.

01:31:18 SPEAKER_011: No, no, no. Me?

01:31:18 SPEAKER_011: Sorry, sorry.

01:31:19 SPEAKER_011: Oh, yes, it's me.

01:31:19 SPEAKER_011: Oh yeah, yes, still here.

01:31:20 SPEAKER_011: Yeah.

01:31:20 SPEAKER_011: So they were wondering if you know where the hard coal is coming from.

01:31:21 SPEAKER_011: I think that they're referring to anthracite.

01:31:21 SPEAKER_011: And are you aware what the current global reserves of coal are?

01:31:21 SPEAKER_011: We have, we have, we have, we have.

01:31:21 SPEAKER_011: You have.

01:31:22 SPEAKER_011: Can you see this, guys?

01:31:22 SPEAKER_011: You have.

01:31:22 SPEAKER_011: We have a lovely presentation, Andrew.

01:31:22 SPEAKER_011: Oh, with both.

01:31:22 SPEAKER_011: Okay, so so you guys, you're going to cover that in Jean Leharres.

01:31:23 SPEAKER_011: Awesome.

01:31:24 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, yeah.

01:31:24 SPEAKER_011: Well, yeah, but John, John Day. is on one side, Charles is on the other.

01:31:24 SPEAKER_011: So I'm assuming it's next.

01:31:24 SPEAKER_011: It's next month.

01:31:25 SPEAKER_011: You'll do John.

01:31:26 SPEAKER_011: Is that right?

01:31:26 SPEAKER_011: Yes, most likely.

01:31:26 SPEAKER_011: And his figure is 500 500 gigatons for hard coal. 500 gigatons.

01:31:27 SPEAKER_011: So it's about some about 2,800 billion barrels equivalent energy equivalent of hard coal.

01:31:28 SPEAKER_011: And yeah, I mean, come to England, we got lots.

01:31:29 SPEAKER_011: We stop mining for the bloody stuff. but it's down there in thin seams and difficult seams and other places.

01:31:29 SPEAKER_011: It's not easy to get, but you know.

01:31:29 SPEAKER_011: Eri oil, five to one, and not in Charlie's.

01:31:30 SPEAKER_011: Not a finding.

01:31:30 SPEAKER_011: Not a splendid Eri either.

01:31:30 SPEAKER_011: It used to have a wonderful Eri.

01:31:30 SPEAKER_011: That's what made Britain, Great Britain, great.

01:31:30 SPEAKER_011: You guys, we had a wonderful Eri, a coal, but now it ain't so good.

01:31:30 SPEAKER_011: But it's there.

01:31:31 SPEAKER_011: And I've got in the paper.

01:31:31 SPEAKER_011: I'm going to finish with Jean.

01:31:31 SPEAKER_011: I'm adding in. some wonderful data from the Encyclopedia Britannica from about 20 years ago on total amounts.

01:31:31 SPEAKER_011: So our paper, when it comes out in Charlie's Journal relatively shortly, will have those key numbers of how much recoverable oil, gas, coal, NBGs, hard coal, soft coal, and so on.

01:31:32 SPEAKER_011: Those key key numbers will be there, revised by Jean, and some brilliant stuff.

01:31:34 SPEAKER_011: Awesome.

01:31:34 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, I guess the viewer data.

01:31:34 SPEAKER_011: I guess the viewer they they wanted.

01:31:35 SPEAKER_011: I guess for the future breakdown of where the coal and the other resources are coming from, if if that's possible.

01:31:35 SPEAKER_011: I'm sure there's a lot in Pennsylvania, deep and difficult.

01:31:35 SPEAKER_011: I'm sure there's a lot in China still, as you know.

01:31:35 SPEAKER_011: India's got a lot.

01:31:35 SPEAKER_011: I need to look at it more closely, Andrew.

01:31:36 SPEAKER_011: It's a very sensible question, but there's a heck a lot of coal that we just haven't touched.

01:31:37 SPEAKER_011: Awesome.

01:31:37 SPEAKER_011: Deep and deep and thin.

01:31:37 SPEAKER_011: I agree.

01:31:38 SPEAKER_011: Thin seams, deep seams, and don't forget if you've got deep thin You got deep, thin seams.

01:31:38 SPEAKER_011: You could, if you don't worry about CO2, and you guys have all been correctly talking about sea level rise.

01:31:38 SPEAKER_011: But if you didn't worry about CO2, you would just pump some air down there and a bit of oxygen and burn the bloody stuff.

01:31:38 SPEAKER_011: And you don't even need to dig it out.

01:31:39 SPEAKER_011: You just in in in in seam gasification.

01:31:39 SPEAKER_011: It's coal, isn't it?

01:31:39 SPEAKER_011: Yes, sir.

01:31:40 SPEAKER_011: It is.

01:31:40 SPEAKER_011: Well, thanks, Dan.

01:31:40 SPEAKER_011: But it goes back to the old question, Roger.

01:31:40 SPEAKER_011: We've been talking about it.

01:31:41 SPEAKER_011: Is look, there's plenty of coal out there.

01:31:42 SPEAKER_011: The question is, what are you willing to pay for?

01:31:42 SPEAKER_011: And it's the same thing with oil.

01:31:42 SPEAKER_011: There's plenty of oil out there.

01:31:42 SPEAKER_011: The question is, what are you willing to pay for?

01:31:42 SPEAKER_011: Yes.

01:31:43 SPEAKER_011: What do you want to pay?

01:31:43 SPEAKER_011: Well, if you pay a lot, then your EROI goes down.

01:31:44 SPEAKER_011: Yeah.

01:31:44 SPEAKER_011: And at some point, it's not a net.

01:31:45 SPEAKER_011: And then it's not economical to do it.

01:31:45 SPEAKER_011: Resource.

01:31:45 SPEAKER_011: So that's nobody is doing that properly.

01:31:46 SPEAKER_011: Nobody.

01:31:46 SPEAKER_011: Quite right, Johnny.

01:31:46 SPEAKER_011: Quite right, Charlie.

01:31:46 SPEAKER_011: Quite right, quite right.

01:31:47 SPEAKER_011: So the research needs doing.

01:31:47 SPEAKER_011: John, no, no, no. Whoever's question it was about the Energy Institute data, that was a really pertinent question.

01:31:47 SPEAKER_011: Every time you meet a funding body or funding authority, American, European, Japanese, Chinese, tell them that we've got to do something to ask the question that Charlie Hall and others are asking: Can we?

01:31:47 SPEAKER_011: Can we go from fossil fuels to?

01:31:47 SPEAKER_011: non-fossil fuels without an awful lot of loss of money, life, health, well-being, war.

01:31:48 SPEAKER_011: The answer is pretty easy.

01:31:48 SPEAKER_011: You know, can we run the world economy on electricity?

01:31:48 SPEAKER_011: And the answer is no. How?

01:31:49 SPEAKER_011: How?

01:31:49 SPEAKER_011: Very simple.

01:31:50 SPEAKER_011: Did John know you can't?

01:31:50 SPEAKER_011: So, but I guess we'll segue here because this was in response. to John Peach asking if we can do that transition, and they were saying, "Well, Simon Michaud has done the analysis end to end,

01:31:50 SPEAKER_011: and the interpretation is there aren't enough minerals to replace the current energy economy."

01:31:50 SPEAKER_011: I don't know if Simon, you want to chip in on this, if you have any updates for us.

01:31:50 SPEAKER_011: Hi, guys.

01:31:51 SPEAKER_011: So, yeah, look, the study that I've put forward is quite simplistic in what it could have been, and the basic answer is. all conventional paths going forward face some sort of bottleneck?

01:31:52 SPEAKER_011: So we need some sort of breakthrough that will completely change the rules on everything.

01:31:52 SPEAKER_011: We've talked about a few of what they might be.

01:31:52 SPEAKER_011: What I'm finding is people themselves are the primary problem.

01:31:52 SPEAKER_011: I'm finding that in the moment we we have any discussion about what a problem might be or what a solution might be, literally hundreds of people will throw themselves in front of the bulldozers, saying,

01:31:52 SPEAKER_011: "No, no, don't do it, don't do it."

01:31:53 SPEAKER_011: Mr. Pyhole.

01:31:54 SPEAKER_011: Right.

01:31:55 SPEAKER_011: So, in terms of status update, and a paper for Charlie, I'm doing an update of my metals, a phase-out metals work for the year 2023, and the numbers have all blown out again.

01:31:55 SPEAKER_011: So the problem's gotten larger.

01:31:56 SPEAKER_011: Oh, what do you mean they've blown out?

01:31:56 SPEAKER_011: Well, between 2018 and 2023, there's more population, more energy's been consumed.

01:31:56 SPEAKER_011: So, so the transport fleet has gotten bigger, but the the analysis got more sophisticated.

01:31:57 SPEAKER_011: And instead of projecting the United States on the rest of the world, I'm now projecting the British United Kingdom, which is a bit more in line with the the areas I'm modelling.

01:31:57 SPEAKER_011: But also things like hydrogen fuel cells are now more efficient.

01:31:57 SPEAKER_011: You get twenty kilowatt hours for a kilogram of hydrogen instead of fifteen, which means the hydrogen economy. can shrink a bit, but then it blows out again.

01:31:58 SPEAKER_011: And instead of using biofuels to do jet fuel, I'm using e-kerosene, right?

01:31:58 SPEAKER_011: And but then you've got to have energy to produce all that.

01:31:59 SPEAKER_011: And before the estimate was forty-eight thousand nine hundred thirty-nine terawatt hours on top of what we do now.

01:31:59 SPEAKER_011: But the current estimate, this will make I don't know if you like the word is laughing or not, but seventy thousand four hundred. and eighty-four thousand terawatt hours of electricity,

01:31:59 SPEAKER_011: or roughly three times what what the twenty twenty-three capacity was.

01:32:00 SPEAKER_011: So, so it's the same basic problems, just larger.

01:32:01 SPEAKER_011: Wow.

01:32:01 SPEAKER_011: So, I think Dusty, do you have a question for Simon?

01:32:01 SPEAKER_011: And wait a minute, and Simon, and you're saying we would have. to increase the world output of minerals like copper, correct?

01:32:04 SPEAKER_011: By how many times?

01:32:04 SPEAKER_011: I think it's I think it's twelve times the historical volume together.

01:32:05 SPEAKER_011: So if you if if it's if you're looking at the annual production, we're up in the hundreds.

01:32:06 SPEAKER_011: Wow.

01:32:06 SPEAKER_011: Let me clarify that in the year 2018, if we were to phase out fossil fuels, and you did. all the sums.

01:32:06 SPEAKER_011: How much metal we would need?

01:32:08 SPEAKER_014: You would require two hundred and fifty-four years of copper production in that year to deliver the full system.

01:32:08 SPEAKER_014: Right.

01:32:08 SPEAKER_014: So, if you were to replace the whole system just to stand still as it was in twenty twenty eighteen, you'd require two hundred and fifty-four years of production and nothing for anything else.

01:32:09 SPEAKER_014: Right.

01:32:12 SPEAKER_014: Right.

01:32:12 SPEAKER_014: So, so, and that's just for these very basic, simple tasks of which.

01:32:12 SPEAKER_014: Basic, simple task of which it's only a fraction of what we actually need to do, and if we think we're going to do it in twenty six years, that's that's that's highly amusing.

01:32:13 SPEAKER_014: Now that was twenty eighteen.

01:32:13 SPEAKER_014: The system has gotten substantially large for twenty twenty three.

01:32:14 SPEAKER_014: Ah, okay, ouch, yeah, yeah, that's a bigger ouch.

01:32:14 SPEAKER_014: Oh, it's it's the same ouch.

01:32:14 SPEAKER_014: Oh, same ouch.

01:32:14 SPEAKER_014: It's it's it's it's like standing next to a nuclear device when it blows up.

01:32:15 SPEAKER_014: Whether it's a kiloton or a megaton. device, it doesn't really matter.

01:32:15 SPEAKER_014: You're still dead.

01:32:15 SPEAKER_014: But but but so so what?

01:32:16 SPEAKER_014: What it basically means: this is a crap plan.

01:32:17 SPEAKER_014: Stop your whining and think of something else.

01:32:17 SPEAKER_014: Is the basic message.

01:32:18 SPEAKER_014: And we know that the rural transition is one of the most realistic.

01:32:18 SPEAKER_014: That's the fallback.

01:32:19 SPEAKER_014: That's the fallback.

01:32:19 SPEAKER_014: But if we do go back to rural and a feudal system, we will lose civilization capacity.

01:32:19 SPEAKER_014: And what concerns me most. is in what's our primary goal for humanity.

01:32:19 SPEAKER_014: For me, is our our primary attribute as a human species is empathy and our capacity for unconditional love, and our ability to stay civilized is related to education.

01:32:19 SPEAKER_014: So we've got to have education for all people, men and women, as for as long as possible.

01:32:20 SPEAKER_014: At the moment, that education window is about twenty years.

01:32:20 SPEAKER_014: And if we go back to the rural way of doing. things, we might lose the capacity to do that.

01:32:21 SPEAKER_014: Well, I was thinking with the LLMs, which, as people in the comments have mentioned, are just databases, advanced caching systems, and they could provide at least some education.

01:32:21 SPEAKER_014: Here's the problem with that.

01:32:21 SPEAKER_014: My comment, Andrew, Andrew, because I'm one of the guys building those AI systems, and yeah, that's great.

01:32:22 SPEAKER_014: That's true, and that's really all it is.

01:32:22 SPEAKER_014: So, so that that's true.

01:32:23 SPEAKER_014: Yes, but what what it means is we, as a species, become dependent on technology, and we get dumber.

01:32:23 SPEAKER_014: We're actually weakening as a species.

01:32:23 SPEAKER_014: We our capability to handle information might increase, but it's now becoming an external thing.

01:32:24 SPEAKER_014: We're becoming the weakest link in the chain instead of the strongest.

01:32:24 SPEAKER_014: That's that's what yeah.

01:32:24 SPEAKER_014: Just to go with what Simon saying, let me give an example, Andre.

01:32:25 SPEAKER_014: One of the things that's come out of the open source community is we're pushing not using AI tools to write software, and the reason why. is because the large language models are full of bugs,

01:32:26 SPEAKER_014: and so basically until the large language models are cleaned up, don't use AI tools to write software, because you're going to write software with security bugs,

01:32:26 SPEAKER_014: and the security systems are going to pick it up.

01:32:26 SPEAKER_014: So, right now, things are not systems.

01:32:26 SPEAKER_014: If we become dependent on these systems that are so fragile, we become dependent.

01:32:26 SPEAKER_014: We lose the capability to do stuff.

01:32:26 SPEAKER_014: Yeah, and then. something happens that all of a sudden we don't have access.

01:32:27 SPEAKER_014: That's very true, Simon.

01:32:27 SPEAKER_014: One of the things I'm doing right now is I'm training my engineers how to do how to do quick sorts and B trees because they don't know how to do it.

01:32:27 SPEAKER_014: Versus when I did computer science one hundred and one, I had to learn how to do B trees and sorts and stuff.

01:32:27 SPEAKER_014: So I have to actually teach my my engineers how to do that stuff because they don't know how to do it.

01:32:27 SPEAKER_014: Slap them hard, make them work.

01:32:30 SPEAKER_014: Yep, make them work.

01:32:30 SPEAKER_014: Well, in my experience, anyways. it's just a different kind of computing paradigm, and I do like most of my coding now using AI or Codex,

01:32:31 SPEAKER_014: and but you just have to have very rigorous testing and scenarios and things like that, and it allows me to produce a lot more code much faster.

01:32:31 SPEAKER_014: And with the local models, we can bring a lot of that stuff in house, and you can run it on your own computer, and once. you have an open source model,

01:32:31 SPEAKER_014: and you realize that it is a database, you can update the database to be more up to date or more in line with that which you wanted to do.

01:32:32 SPEAKER_014: But I see Dusty has wait a minute.

01:32:32 SPEAKER_014: Let me ask you, you guys, something.

01:32:33 SPEAKER_014: Okay, here we we were just in a moment about how we are unable to have a good.

01:32:34 SPEAKER_014: We don't have any good. model.

01:32:34 SPEAKER_014: Only good model, maybe Capelan Perez in Spain and his crew is trying, but we don't have a good model for understanding whether we can do the transition.

01:32:35 SPEAKER_014: We have to go to all kinds of people who have little pieces of it.

01:32:36 SPEAKER_014: I have a little.

01:32:36 SPEAKER_014: Charlie, you're going to have to turn off your camera because we can't make out your audio.

01:32:37 SPEAKER_014: Um.

01:32:37 SPEAKER_014: Okay.

01:32:37 SPEAKER_014: I don't know.

01:32:37 SPEAKER_014: Okay.

01:32:38 SPEAKER_014: Okay.

01:32:39 SPEAKER_014: I. I think I can.

01:32:40 SPEAKER_014: Wait a minute.

01:32:40 SPEAKER_014: I don't.

01:32:41 SPEAKER_014: Yeah.

01:32:42 SPEAKER_014: Okay.

01:32:42 SPEAKER_014: So, all you fancy guys, Dan and so forth, you you have all this AI.

01:32:43 SPEAKER_014: You say that can do all this stuff, but you can't.

01:32:43 SPEAKER_014: You're not even addressing what we have identified as the big question, the main question.

01:32:43 SPEAKER_014: That's the big question.

01:32:45 SPEAKER_014: The main question.

01:32:46 SPEAKER_014: The only question.

01:32:47 SPEAKER_014: The AI systems couldn't solve this.

01:32:47 SPEAKER_014: I already know.

01:32:48 SPEAKER_014: Why?

01:32:49 SPEAKER_014: Because, because the data in there is incorrect.

01:32:49 SPEAKER_014: I mean, garbage in, garbage out.

01:32:49 SPEAKER_014: Well, well, that's an important question unto itself.

01:32:50 SPEAKER_014: Here we have identified what we perceive to be the major question facing us, and you're there.

01:32:50 SPEAKER_014: Several of you are talking about, oh wow, whoop-de-do AI, and yet you're saying. not only can it not answer it, it can't even flip and address it.

01:32:51 SPEAKER_014: So why are you wasting our time?

01:32:51 SPEAKER_011: All the AI systems are simply just all they just said a query tool to query lumps of unstructured data.

01:32:52 SPEAKER_011: That's really all.

01:32:52 SPEAKER_011: All ChatGPT and OpenAI.

01:32:52 SPEAKER_011: Well, they're they're massively parallel correlations.

01:32:53 SPEAKER_011: That's not the same.

01:32:53 SPEAKER_011: Back in the '90s, when I was developing guidance systems for missiles, those used neural networks where you had to train them.

01:32:53 SPEAKER_011: That was actual AI.

01:32:53 SPEAKER_011: They're training.

01:32:53 SPEAKER_011: That was actual AI, but ChatGPT and OpenAI—that is not artificial intelligence.

01:32:54 SPEAKER_011: That's all it is—is you're coring large chunks of data.

01:32:54 SPEAKER_011: That's all it really does.

01:32:54 SPEAKER_011: Garbage in, garbage out.

01:32:54 SPEAKER_011: Well, since nobody's done the right studies, I say on Eli.

01:32:54 SPEAKER_011: One of the things they don't talk about publicly right now: Sam Altman is being sued because he's got a lot of intellectual property in his large language models that he didn't pay for.

01:32:54 SPEAKER_011: So Dusty had a question.

01:32:58 SPEAKER_011: Dusty, go ahead.

01:32:59 SPEAKER_011: Yeah,

01:33:00 SPEAKER_011: my question is kind of in line with Charlie a little bit in the sense that you know we and and before you guys were talking about education and a big issue to me is what

01:33:00 SPEAKER_011: I call energy education and like your average person has absolutely no clue how much energy they use and part of that I feel is on purpose because.

01:33:00 SPEAKER_011: Feels on purpose because if if you try to actually figure out, you know, for a while we had that like carbon footprint concept that kind of totally went away, disappeared.

01:33:01 SPEAKER_011: I haven't seen, heard, or seen of that for a while.

01:33:01 SPEAKER_011: But on your individual basis, if you try to look up, you know, the amount of energy that your average American uses, even from the government websites, it's all done in either a, you know,

01:33:02 SPEAKER_011: a different format, or they don't even tell you how much it is.

01:33:02 SPEAKER_011: Is it per year?

01:33:02 SPEAKER_011: Is it per hour?

01:33:02 SPEAKER_011: Is it per day?

01:33:03 SPEAKER_011: There's just a lot of confusion out there, and so that's what I've been trying to do:

01:33:03 SPEAKER_011: is figure out how we can fully wrap our minds around how much your average person uses of energy per person per year, and from all sources,

01:33:03 SPEAKER_011: including you know the difference between your exports and imports and things that aren't just electricity.

01:33:03 SPEAKER_011: I mean, people can't even get straight energy and electricity.

01:33:03 SPEAKER_011: So, like the difference between the two.

01:33:04 SPEAKER_011: So, I think that's a big issue.

01:33:04 SPEAKER_011: Dusty, I've got an eight-eight lecture basic energy series.

01:33:04 SPEAKER_011: You tell me how to get it out to the world.

01:33:04 SPEAKER_011: I'll send it to you.

01:33:04 SPEAKER_011: But I need your email.

01:33:04 SPEAKER_011: My email should be in some of the chat streams.

01:33:04 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:33:05 SPEAKER_011: You guys can email each other on that.

01:33:05 SPEAKER_011: That that sounds great.

01:33:05 SPEAKER_011: I know we we had the footprint guy on. here?

01:33:05 SPEAKER_011: He was a friend of Charlie's.

01:33:05 SPEAKER_011: I don't remember his name right now.

01:33:05 SPEAKER_011: Do you remember?

01:33:06 SPEAKER_011: He was a Nobel Prize winner.

01:33:06 SPEAKER_011: Oh, Matas Walker Nagel.

01:33:06 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, exactly.

01:33:06 SPEAKER_011: So yeah, we had him on here.

01:33:06 SPEAKER_011: Well, wait a minute, Andre.

01:33:06 SPEAKER_011: Do we have the capacity to somehow get a site that gets the basic information to anyone in the world?

01:33:06 SPEAKER_011: That's what needs to be done.

01:33:08 SPEAKER_011: Just the basic information.

01:33:08 SPEAKER_011: So they can think properly about it instead of all the bullshit they get from the media.

01:33:08 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, I would be happy to collaborate with someone.

01:33:09 SPEAKER_011: I could do the infrastructure if someone wanted to do the content.

01:33:09 SPEAKER_011: You know how to do that?

01:33:09 SPEAKER_011: Then great, let's do it.

01:33:09 SPEAKER_011: I have lots of websites.

01:33:09 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, yeah.

01:33:10 SPEAKER_011: All right, because I've got all the pieces, or many of them.

01:33:11 SPEAKER_011: Very good.

01:33:11 SPEAKER_011: Very good.

01:33:11 SPEAKER_011: We'll work together on it in the email stream.

01:33:11 SPEAKER_011: Okay, Iver, I see your hand up.

01:33:11 SPEAKER_011: I heard something kind of interesting the other day.

01:33:11 SPEAKER_011: They were saying these people were talking about why the price of oil isn't higher than it is right now.

01:33:12 SPEAKER_011: And what it turns out to be is all these traders use AI to trade.

01:33:12 SPEAKER_011: So the thing about them using AI to trade is they've managed to spoof the AI by throwing out all these stories that say there's an oil glut and all this kind of stuff.

01:33:12 SPEAKER_011: And so what happens is. there's you know they look on their AI and they decide okay it looks like it's a good trade,

01:33:12 SPEAKER_011: and they they're bringing the price of oil down by dumping in all this info on you know they look over all the newspaper story not newspaper but all the stories and all the media.

01:33:13 SPEAKER_011: Let me just get the mic on, and they dig out of that, and they realize okay there's going to be an oil glut in the future, and they're talking you know the near. future.

01:33:13 SPEAKER_011: You know, the most oil prices are futures, right?

01:33:13 SPEAKER_011: So that's what they're doing, and that's the reason that oil is trading around seventy dollars a barrel right now, because they think it's going to get, you know, there's going to be a glut.

01:33:13 SPEAKER_011: Iver, I'm going to interject here.

01:33:14 SPEAKER_011: So this is watching this whole thing go back and forth.

01:33:14 SPEAKER_011: I know Art Berman has written a paper and basically talked about this whole very complex sort of thing.

01:33:14 SPEAKER_011: But what's going on?

01:33:14 SPEAKER_011: First of all, you know I talk to the guys up at the Whiting refinery that's run by BP up in northern Indiana, and understand they when they purchase oil,

01:33:14 SPEAKER_011: they buy a lot of different grades of oil and they blend it together to make a grade that they can run for the refinery.

01:33:14 SPEAKER_011: So it's a bunch of light stuff and heavy stuff they blend together.

01:33:16 SPEAKER_011: Now the prices they pay is not WTI.

01:33:17 SPEAKER_011: What they pay is closer to what's on.

01:33:17 SPEAKER_011: There's something called USO, which US oil is a derivative.

01:33:17 SPEAKER_011: Oil, it's a derivative, and if you look at the prices of that, the prices have been over a hundred since since March.

01:33:17 SPEAKER_011: Okay, is that the refineries in the Persian Gulf?

01:33:18 SPEAKER_011: They're not so.

01:33:18 SPEAKER_011: There's light sweet isn't going into the Persian Gulf, going through those refineries at the same time that medium crude isn't coming out.

01:33:18 SPEAKER_011: So there is a glut, but it's a glut of light sweet crude, and there's not enough of that medium heavy stuff to make diesel.

01:33:18 SPEAKER_011: So you're going to watch. probably.

01:33:19 SPEAKER_011: Let's say I think it's tomorrow is when basically our SPR is down to military levels, and from here on out, the president will have to sign a waiver so we can go into military stockpiles,

01:33:20 SPEAKER_011: which was 243 million barrels in the SPR.

01:33:20 SPEAKER_011: And by October 4th, the United States will our SPR will be gone.

01:33:20 SPEAKER_011: So understand between the SPR basically pumping out some of that meeting crew to keep the refineries running, and China is cut.

01:33:21 SPEAKER_011: And China has cut back their consumption by about four million barrels a day, and that's what you're seeing the price.

01:33:21 SPEAKER_011: But what I'm trying to tell you is that WTI that is not the price that the refineries are making.

01:33:22 SPEAKER_011: If you go out there and look at the crack spread, it's one of the highest crack spreads in the in in history, right?

01:33:22 SPEAKER_014: But the problem with that chart with the crack spread is that's based up at WTI versus you know what it what it costs for the refiners to output diesel and gasoline.

01:33:23 SPEAKER_014: That refineries are not paying that price.

01:33:23 SPEAKER_014: They're they're buying that medium to heavy crude, and it's very expensive, over a hundred dollars a barrel.

01:33:24 SPEAKER_014: So I'm just trying to tell you is you really can't take that WTI or Brent price.

01:33:24 SPEAKER_014: It's because the problem is that that's you're right, Ivor is being manipulated by the Wall Streeters.

01:33:24 SPEAKER_014: That has nothing to do with what's going on at the refinery.

01:33:25 SPEAKER_014: Okay, I I know Barbara's had her hand up a long time, and then Simon.

01:33:25 SPEAKER_014: Okay, go ahead, Barbara.

01:33:26 SPEAKER_014: You have to unmute.

01:33:27 SPEAKER_014: Sorry about that.

01:33:27 SPEAKER_014: You know,

01:33:27 SPEAKER_014: one of the things that I think listening to John and maybe also Dusty today about the sometimes we call it the unintended consequences of our technologies because we don't want to admit that we knew

01:33:28 SPEAKER_014: damn well that we were contaminating the groundwater around our wells.

01:33:28 SPEAKER_014: At least we knew.

01:33:28 SPEAKER_014: Basically, knew fairly soon.

01:33:28 SPEAKER_014: It's and and we started talking about mitigation.

01:33:29 SPEAKER_014: You know, we need to figure out how to keep New Orleans above sea level or move New Orleans.

01:33:29 SPEAKER_014: We could have moved New Orleans after Katrina, and instead, a rather dismal government response decided that we should rebuild in an area that people are basically not. fit to be inhabited, and we spent,

01:33:29 SPEAKER_014: I think, trillions on rebuilding the areas.

01:33:29 SPEAKER_014: Texas coast has the same problem.

01:33:29 SPEAKER_014: We're we're allowing building permits along the coast and in areas that used to be outside the 500-year floodplain and and now flood every five or six years,

01:33:29 SPEAKER_014: and and we're still allowing insurance and and permits to to rebuild that that should never have been there in the first place,

01:33:30 SPEAKER_014: and so it seems as if one of the things we need to look at is not so much mitigating all of that mess that we've made in the past,

01:33:30 SPEAKER_014: but the cost of making sure that when we go and go down and gasify all that coal, and I'll tell you, I've looked at it in Pennsylvania.

01:33:30 SPEAKER_014: There's a heck of a lot of it that we don't end up. then destroying the Pennsylvania environment the way we destroyed Louisiana and and coal did it in the past pretty badly.

01:33:30 SPEAKER_014: There's still areas there that are that are unusable, nothing but piles of semi-burning coal refuse.

01:33:31 SPEAKER_014: So I I think something we need to add is prior mitigation and making sure that you don't get to do things without having thought through the costs of making sure that we don't end up

01:33:31 SPEAKER_014: with New Orleans again everywhere we put it.

01:33:31 SPEAKER_014: And of course, you're right.

01:33:32 SPEAKER_014: Portland doesn't care because they get the benefits with none of the disadvantages that seem to get pretty much pushed to not just Texas and Louisiana, but you know,

01:33:32 SPEAKER_014: Montana is is getting it. with some of its coal, so I don't know how we.

01:33:32 SPEAKER_014: What do you think, Simon?

01:33:33 SPEAKER_014: Could we add some sort of mitigating, obviously probable consequences to to some of these cost plans, or is it just beyond?

01:33:33 SPEAKER_014: So that's an interesting question.

01:33:33 SPEAKER_014: It really does come down to: will our societies actually cooperate?

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: He's actually cooperate.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: Will we play nice?

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: Because there will be some regions of the planet to see the wisdom of that.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: Now, I saw that in Brisbane, Australia.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: Now, in Brisbane, every now and then it would get hot.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: Lots of people started installing air conditioning.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: Of course, when it gets hot, everyone turns the air conditioning on at the same time.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: Oh gosh, the grid crashes, and suddenly no one's got any power.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: It took a few goes of things going horribly wrong before we.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: largely go, yeah, maybe we should do something different.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: Around the same time, we had a drought on, and our water reserve—the rain shadow filling up our reservoir—moved.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: It's not that we didn't have the water anymore; it wasn't going into our dam, and so the reservoir for a city of about you know a million people got down to sixteen percent.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: And you should have heard the the rhetoric from the politicians.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: I hope they can eat us alive.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: on camera.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: Let's go.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_014: Anyway, so what I'm getting at at that society at the time did put some things on the ground.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: Says, okay, we we has ourselves a problem here, young ladies and gentlemen.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: Let's try these things, and they put a series of things on on the ground, and society sort of got behind them and sort of did it.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: So, to answer your question, in some part of the world, it will be okay.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: As in we could do that if we chose.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: Other parts of the world, well, they're run by dumb asses that can't agree on the colour of an orange, and it's probably going to be a bit difficult.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: So it depends on where you are, and whether your society can actually come together as a society, or is it every carbon-based biped for themselves?

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: Well, and I—I have to say, my take is that most cities are.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: unsustainable, yeah, in their current forms, and then it becomes the question of of whether folks like Andrew and I, who are out in in the hinterlands, are willing to support those refugees, or whether we just line up and shoot them as they as they come down the roads, because we it's physically impossible to feed them.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: Yeah, and and and yet I'll have to say I can remember my.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: grandmother talking about splitting their last loaf of bread with a train.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: It was just what people did in rural areas hundred years ago.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: Well, that's the understanding that the people will turn on each other if they don't.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: Yeah, if if if if people got the idea that our neighbor might have food, but they're not going to share it for this, I'm not going to bother talking to them.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: I'm going to shoot them and take their food.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: or we could say if they've got food, they'll talk to us and they'll share it if they've got it, Yes, that was the social contract at the time, and and also I think truly the average city dweller in the developed world this these days wouldn't know how to get food if you held a gun to their head and demanded that they actually produce some.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_014: Right, I mean there.